London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

NO wonder celebrity Jim Davidson is finding life tough with a £2.2m mortgage.

The entertainer, who claims to have the biggest mortgage in the history of the Halifax, has admitted to struggling to pay the bills despite being one of the highest earners on TV just three years ago.

Since parting company with BBC show The Generation Game, Davidson estimates he has seen his annual earnings slump from more than £4m a year to less than £1m.

And the much-divorced star says he has monthly outgoings of more than £70,000 including tax, child maintenance and his mortgage.

Yet his mortgage is small fry compared to some of the home loans being arranged by specialist broker Savills Private Finance.

Mark Harris at Savills PFD said: 'We specialise in doing a lot of very high value mortgages and the largest mortgage deal I have arranged was for £12m. More recently I arranged a mortgage for £7m and we do a mortage over £1m every day.

'Mortgages over £2m are slightly more rare than £1m-plus deals, mainly because properties in this bracket would probably be worth at least £3m and there are not many houses in the UK at this price.'

There are an estimated 30,000 houses in the UK worth more than £1m. Yet with the average house costing £132,079, according to the Halifax‘s July house price index, Davidson is still in an elite group of homeowners.

And a large chunk of his monthly bills are likely to be for his mortgage payments. According to Alison Cooley, spokeswoman for independent financial adviser Charcol, the monthly payments on a mortgage of £2.2m could easily top £12,000.

'Someone taking out a mortgage of £2.2m, paying interest at 4.5% say, on a 25-year repayment basis, could expect to pay £12,363 a month,' she said.

Opting for an interest-only mortgage rather than a repayment could save Jim Davidson some money. On the same terms as before this would cost him £8,250 a month, a saving of more than £4,000 a month in the short term.

Halifax refused to confirm whether Davidson had the biggest mortgage in its history on grounds of 'client confidentiality', nor say how many of its customers‘ mortgages topped the £2m mark.

But spokeswoman Joanne Gill said: 'This is a small part of the market. Even mortgages over £250,000 are catering for the upper end of the market and the number of mortgages over £1m in the UK overall is very small.'